‘I’m loving this era I’ve been thrust into’: Denise Welch on depression, daytime TV and her dramatic renaissance

Denise Welch doesn’t seem the kind of woman who would turn up with an entourage. But here she is having her hair primped in a makeshift changing room by two people. One tickling her fringe, the other tweaking her tufts. Blimey, I say, have you got two assistants? She grins. “No. There are three.” And now it turns out she’s got a fourth. I offer to make her a cup of coffee. She warns me she’s fussy. “Three teaspoons of Coffee-Mate, please.”

Welch is having a moment. She calls it, with a fabulously camp flourish, her renaissance. The actor and Loose Women regular has hardly been invisible in recent years. But this is on another level. For most of the 2000s, she has been best known for dishing out blithe opinions about anything and everything, and being the mother of the 1975’s frontman, Matty Healy. Now, though, it’s the acting that’s getting the attention. Earlier this month, she returned to the drama series Waterloo Road as the hopeless French teacher Steph Haydock after a 15‑year absence. This time around, she’s a supply teacher and is even more hopeless. Welch has also got parts in the new Russell T Davies drama series Tip Toe, the Josh Pugh sitcom Stepping Up, both on Channel 4, and the adaptation of Graham Norton’s novel Forever Home.

And there’s more. At 67, Welch has become an unlikely fashion darling. Last month she featured in the ultra‑trendy counterculture magazine i-D, and in November she became a party correspondent for GQ, working the red carpet at the Man of the Year awards in blacked-out wraparound sunnies and thigh-high Off‑White boots. Then there was the wedding of Charli xcx and the 1975 drummer George Daniel in Sicily. Forget the A-listers in attendance; the young and beautiful celebs were queueing up to take selfies with Welch.

It’s great to see her in such good form because it has not always been this way. Despite her lust for life, Welch has struggled for many years with depression and addiction. For much of that time, she was monstered by the press. But not any more.

What’s brought about the change? Well, she says, she sort of willed it. “I’m not a manifester, but I sort of did manifest it. I spoke to my agent and I said I want 2025 to be a bit of a renaissance for me. I’d always been jealous of people.” She pulls to a stop, caveating the next sentence before it’s even left her mouth. “You will write this like I’m saying it, won’t you, because it can sound really naff? So, I’d always been a bit jealous of people who had a team – you know when you see people turning up at a photoshoot and they have a team? I’d never had a team. Anyway, I’d lost a bit of weight and I was feeling mentally very good in myself, and everything depends on my mental health, so I thought I’m going to get my own stylist and hairdresser, and I’m going to get a publicist and I’m going to change direction.” Has she got the money to pay for her team? “No! But it’s not like it’s every day. It’s not like I have the glam team to my house every morning.”

So, with her entourage she’s basically turning into Snoop Denise? “I am! And I’m loving this fashionista era that I’ve been thrust into. When I got asked to do a fashion shoot for i-D magazine, Matty said to me, ‘That’s great, Mum, even I’ve never done i-D!’ I love the fact that I know nothing about high fashion. So I let these wonderful stylists put these weird and wonderful things on me. You have a great photographer and suddenly you’re a different person.”

As we’re talking, her publicist reminds her she has not changed out of her vintage Chanel top, and the Guardian needs to return it. She apologises, rushes off, and returns in a lovely striped roll-neck. “It’s from Florence & Fred at Tesco.”

To many, Welch isn’t just an actor, Loose Woman and the mother of a rock star – she is also a prime hun, feted by the Instagram account @Loveofhuns, which celebrates Britain’s glitziest and kitschiest pop-cultural icons.

I tell her I’m not completely au fait with hun culture, and ask her to explain it. “The hun thing is hilarious to me. It’s quite hard to describe. Carol Vorderman is a hun. Alison Hammond is a hun. I’m a hun.” So what is it? “Gays and huns all mesh together. I’ve always had that following. You’ve got to remember as well that my dad was a heterosexual drag artist so he went out as Raquel. Raquel Welch. He loved the fact that I was an actress. He encouraged me. He knew I wouldn’t be a very good teacher, so it’s been great that I’ve been able to play a rubbish teacher in Waterloo Road.”

Welch is hugely entertaining and can talk for England. But her conversation is hardly linear. Even her detours have detours. So a question about hun culture takes in her childhood in the north-east; her father, Vin, a sweet factory owner by day and drag queen by night; her plan to become a teacher because she only needed one A-level; the unconditional offer to go to Mountview theatre school in London; her early days in theatre, the delight Vin took in her chosen profession, and his liking nothing more than a night out with her gay friends because they knew how to have fun.

So what is hun culture, I ask again, some time later. “Ah, yes!” She laughs. What qualities do you need? “You’ve got to be loved by the gays. So, if you think of the people the gays love. It started with me when I played a bitch in Coronation Street. The gays love a bitch. Joan Collins’ Alexis would have made her a hun.” Huns are not known for their political correctness. They are often loved for their unfiltered take on life. Which is true of Welch – to an extent.

She was in Coronation Street from 1997 to 2000 as the marriage wrecker Natalie Barnes. That was her first serious brush with fame. “You’ve got to remember when Natalie married Des Barnes it was watched by almost 20 million people. That’s a third of this country. When I go to watch Matty at the O2, there’s maybe 20,000 people there. When you think of 20 million … There was nowhere you went where you weren’t known.”

Did she enjoy the fame? “Fame in isolation is no fun. I would hate to be famous without a talent to back it up. But there are parts of fame I’d hate to give up.” Such as? “I like being in a lift and smiling at somebody, and them saying, “Eeeh, you know that’s really made my day! Wait till I tell my daughter that I met you. Eeeh!’”

It’s little wonder that Welch is ambivalent about fame. Few people have been so badly burnt by the press, though she didn’t half help matters. “I put myself in situations over the years that I’m not proud of as a result of addiction. Fourteen years sober, I feel like a different person.” For more than a decade she was addicted to alcohol and cocaine. The surprising thing, she says, is that it all happened so late in life. Throughout her 20s she didn’t have the slightest trouble with drink or drugs. Sure, she liked a bev on a Friday night, maybe even a Saturday, too, but her thing was clubbing. She loved going out with gay friends and dancing the night away. Throughout this time, she says, she was the model professional.

But, at 31, and married to her second husband, the actor Tim Healy, she gave birth to Matty. Welch thought she would bond with him instantly. As for her friends, they thought she’d be back out clubbing within weeks. But neither happened. She was struck by an extreme form of postnatal depression that has never left her. “Many, many women will make a full recovery, and it will never darken their doors again. But I’ve lived with that illness for 36 years.” And you’d never had depression before? “Never. Not one day. I used to say, ‘Ooh, I’m really depressed’ if I didn’t get a job, but that’s completely different to the illness.” Postnatal depression affects so many women, she says, yet hardly any money is spent on research or support. “If men had postnatal depression, there’d be a clinic on every corner. There are so many advances made, but it’s being made on a budget of fourpence. They’re now finding a huge connection between ADHD and postnatal depression.” Welch was diagnosed with ADHD four years ago.

She struggled with her depression for the best part of a decade before turning to drink and drugs. “That didn’t happen till my late 30s. I was self-medicating.”

In 2024, she had her first bad episode in five years, and had to withdraw from the Christmas production of Peter Pan at the Theatre Royal in Nottingham. Her depression tends to come with no warning and no external trigger. “I can be talking to somebody, not even thinking about how I feel, and the atmosphere changes. I get a tingling in my palm and a metallic taste in my mouth, and within 30 seconds everything I’d been looking forward to goes and there is zero joy. It’s down on me, and I can do nothing about it until it lifts.”

Is she always confident that it will lift? “When you’ve had it so many times, you have the security of knowing it will leave.” But she knows that’s not the case for everybody. “People who take their life usually do not want to die; they just want to stop the pain.” Has she ever thought she would take her own life? “Every depressive will tell you you have it in your back pocket as a solace: ‘If I don’t get better I can do that.’ But I never seriously thought about that because I had enough experience of always getting better, and I knew outside these episodes I loved my fucking life.”

Although she was convinced that drink and drugs helped her get through her depression, she eventually realised substance abuse was a double whammy. Welch became unreliable, volatile and confrontational. She gives me an example from her early days on Loose Women. “When you’re drinking you get defensive, so before the press would say anything, I would say, ‘Anyway, what’s wrong with somebody in their 40s being out all night and partying and coming straight to work now and again? What’s wrong with that?’” You’d say that on the show? “Yes! I had to own it.”

Worst of all, she says, she became so boring. Was she oblivious to that at the time? “Of course I was. You think you’re the most interesting person on the planet. It never occurs to you how boring you are. I don’t know how I’ve still got any friends.”

Welch became tabloid gold. Barely a week passed without a story of inappropriate behaviour splashed across the red-tops and the women’s mags. “Bella and Best hated it when I got sober because they didn’t have any front pages any more!” Welch didn’t know where the stories were coming from. Private conversations were finding their way into the tabloids, and she became suspicious of those closest to her. “I was so paranoid. You don’t trust anybody. It was, like, how do they know I was there?”

Did she challenge family and friends? “I didn’t question anybody in my family, but I questioned friends.” Did she fall out with any? “Erm, possibly not fall out,” she says uncertainly. “I thought that maybe they’d inadvertently been among journalists and said some things. I’d go, ‘But you were the only person who knew that’ and if they said, ‘I would never say that’, I had to believe them. I was going mad.”

Welch only discovered the truth a decade later when the police presented her with the evidence. It was shocking, and went way beyond conventional phone hacking. “They were putting bugs in my hotel rooms. I didn’t have to prove my hacking because the guy who hacked me, Graham Johnson, the former investigations editor at the Sunday Mirror, came forward and became poacher turned gamekeeper. I’ve met him and we’ve made peace. He was the one who witnessed private investigators coming out of my hotel room having planted a listening device. He was just the messenger. The people who ordered the hacking have never even been to court, and that fucks me off hugely.”

She says photographers have since apologised about the manner in which they pursued her. “The paps have said to me, ‘We felt sorry for you in those days because we were told to go after you.’” Because they knew you were vulnerable? “Because everybody would believe everything they said. So, if I came out of a restaurant and closed my eyes in a shot and was sober, they’d put, ‘Denise fell out of the restaurant’ and if I said, ‘No, I didn’t, I was sober’, nobody would believe me. I’ve always said if I’m in a nightclub and I’m doing something I shouldn’t and a press person is there and they capture me, hands up, gov! That’s my fault. But if they’re getting that information by putting a bug in your hotel room … ” She trails off.

On the day the twin towers were attacked in New York, Welch was filming. That evening she met up with friends in a bar. “They were worried that my depression was going to kick in, so they said come up to London and we’ll look after you. We went to a bar and I came out of a toilet cubicle and there was this beautiful Indian girl and she said, ‘Oh God, you’re Denise Welch, aren’t you? I’m a big fan of yours.’ I said, ‘Thank you so much. Isn’t it a horrible time?’” The woman offered to buy Welch a drink, and she accepted. “She said she was on her own, and I introduced her to my friends. She was this poor little rich girl who said her dad had a boat on the Thames and asked whether we’d all like to go on it one day, and I’m thinking, absolutely! Anyway, being me, at the end of the night I gave her my phone number and said, ‘Please stay in touch.’ Every day for pretty much three weeks this girl, Nyra, called me. Could I go to this or that? And I’d be, like, ‘Yes, I’m just bathing Louis, then I’m running Matty to school.’ After three weeks I went to do a photoshoot in Spain. And I got the dreaded Saturday afternoon phone call saying we’re running a story about you tomorrow. I got my friend to go to King’s Cross station, where you used to get the first papers at 10.30pm, and he said, ‘It’s not good.’ I was devastated. It turned out this person had been a journalist sent to entrap me into a friendship for three weeks.”

What was the story? She’d prefer not to say. “It just was not good. It’s stuff that you’d say to a person you thought was a friend.” She’s becoming tearful. “I get upset thinking about it. It’s horrible.” It’s so much worse when your instinct is to trust people, I say. “Yes, and I’m a people pleaser.” It’s true. For all her willingness to mouth off, Welch likes to be liked.

Did she ever see the woman again? “No, I didn’t. I picked up the phone at 3am, when a bolt of lightning made me realise who it was. She said, ‘Hello’ and I just said, ‘Well, you’ve got your blood money. I hope your parents are very, very proud of you.’ And that was it. For years, I’d thought it was coincidental that she turned up … I didn’t realise I’d been entrapped.”

In the end, Welch received compensation from a number of news organisations after the police presented her with the evidence. “You sit at Putney police station and there’s a spreadsheet of years of your life, phone calls you made, places they’d rented across from you to spy on you for two weeks. And you’re thinking, oh my God!”

It was after Welch met Lincoln Townley, who became her third husband, that she finally got sober. Townley, then a PR and marketing manager at Stringfellows, was also struggling with addiction. The tabloids labelled him her alcoholic toyboy (he is 14 years younger than Welch) and suggested their relationship had no chance of lasting. Both are now into their 15th year of sobriety. “My marriage to Lincoln is the bedrock of my life,” Welch says. Townley is now a successful artist whose work is collected by the likes of Michael Caine and Al Pacino. It has not just been an incredible renaissance for Welch; it has been for Townley, too.

Has marriage been important in her life? “Yes! I’ve had three of them!” When I mention her first, to the actor David Easter (who played Pat in Brookside), she steers me away from it. “That was not very long-lived. But my marriage to Tim was one of 24 years, and we have two wonderful children and we’re still friends. I never consider my marriage to Tim a failure. Lincoln and I are very good friends with him and Jo, his wife. She’s a great stepmum to the kids.” Louis, Welch’s younger son from her marriage to Healy, is also an actor.

Like his mother, Matty Healy has spent much of his life in the public eye – partly because of his own success and partly because of who he has dated, including FKA twigs and Taylor Swift. He has also experienced substance abuse (in 2018, he admitted he had been addicted to heroin) and has a knack for courting controversy.

When I mention this she stiffens. “I don’t like to talk about Matty’s personal life because it comes back and bites me on the arse every time with the press.” Do she and Matty share their experiences? “Matty understands what I’ve been through, for sure. I’m very proud of my kids and they love me very much, but I’m very respectful of their lives and it’s up to them to talk about it.” Has she advised him on his issues with addiction? “Obviously it’s something that we have shared and it means we have a great understanding of each other’s psyche. We have a very close relationship.” And she zips up. “That’s it.”

For all that she prides herself on not caring what she says, Welch clearly does. And for good reason. She doesn’t like hurting people unnecessarily, she wants to protect her family, and she couldn’t have had a more chastening experience of press intrusion. But however hard she tries to self-censor these days, she doesn’t always succeed. Last July, on Andy Cohen’s Bravo show Watch What Happens Live, he asked what her reaction was to The Tortured Poets Department, the album Taylor Swift wrote about Matty after they separated (one song was called The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived). Welch replied, “Obviously, on pain of death can I talk about that episode, but not being her mother-in-law is a role that I’m glad I lost.” She paused, before quickly adding, “Not that I have anything against her at all.” But by then the damage was done. She added that Matty had moved on and was “very happy with his amazing fiancee”, the California model and singer Gabbriette Bechtel.

Is it true that part of her new fashion icon status is down to Bechtel? She looks puzzled. Well, I say, I hear she’s passing some of the stuff that she gets sent on to you. “Oh, listen! She’s a supermodel. Of course she gets sent lots of clothes and of course me and her mum are going to have some. Absolutely! I love her, and I’m very happy for the pair of them.”

Is she a better prospective daughter-in-law than Taylor Swift?

“I’m pleading the fifth!” she says.

We talk about Loose Women, which has just returned after ITV announced swingeing cuts. “We were all sad about the cuts. Not for us but for the whole team – 200 people lost their jobs. I did the show yesterday and now we’re all together – This Morning, Lorraine and everything – there’s a camaraderie. So, yes, we’re disappointed about some of the things, but change happens.”

Anyway, Loose Women is only one of many things keeping her busy, what with all the new acting roles and magazine shoots. It’s funny, Welch says, she thinks she might well be better known today than she was in her Corrie heyday a quarter of a century ago. I ask if it’s true that, at Charli xcx and George Daniel’s wedding, she didn’t have a clue who the A-listers lining up for selfies with her were? She giggles. “Well, you wouldn’t!” Who were the most famous people you were photographed with that you didn’t recognise? “Well, Alex Consani, the supermodel. What’s that singer called? Troye Sivan. And Rachel Sennott. Now I do know who they are, it’s, like, oh my God! They’re fucking huge! Rachel Sennott does the kind of work I want to do. Troye Sivan has got 16 million followers!” She whoops with delight. Did they know who you were? “They knew I was Matty’s mum. I just thought they were a lovely bunch of people.”

Trolls scoffed at the idea of her being at the wedding, she says, but she was always going to be there. “I’ve known George since he was 12 because George is Matty’s best friend. The 1975 started in my garage. I fed them, I watered them, they stayed at our house. That was why I was at George and Charli’s wedding. It was wonderful.”

Was the event heaving with drink and drugs, as people were speculating online? “No!” she says, seemingly shocked. “I don’t drink!” That’s what I was thinking, I say – I’d assumed it would have been a hedonist’s heaven, and was wondering how she coped. “Well, no, because George and Charli aren’t hedonistic. And if there was, I wasn’t aware of it. Lincoln and I will be at any party if it’s people we love, but as soon as the madness starts – and I’m talking about the madness now being three glasses of wine because I can’t be around drunk people – we do an Irish or French exit and we’re off.”

Is she ever tempted by booze these days? “I have no desire to join in at any event on the drinking front. We can’t be around drunk people because they are the most boring people in the entire universe and I want to smash their faces in. And I was one of them. And when you become sober you realise how little other people have to drink before that ‘I’m going to punch you’ phase starts. And these are people that you love.”

Her car’s here. Welch is worried we’ve accentuated the negative. “You will make out that I’m a really fun person as well, won’t you?” Impossible not to, I say. “I’d love you to mention the lovely things coming up, too.” Will do, I say. “And how excited I am about the future?” Yep. “And how good I feel mentally at the moment.” Of course.

Before you go, though, I say, I heard you had a funny story about Michael Caine? “Eh?” she says. And then she remembers. “Oh, yes. We’re very friendly with Michael and [his wife] Shakira because Michael is a huge fan of Lincoln’s work. We went to his 90th birthday and Shakira asked me to say a few words, and I thought how can I say a few words at Michael Caine’s birthday? And Tom Cruise and all these people are there. And I thought I can’t do it, I can’t. And then Joan Collins got up and made people laugh. And I thought, ‘Oh, I can’t have that!’ And I suddenly got up and found myself becoming the Bernard Manning of the room, and Tom Cruise literally had his napkin out crying-laughing at me doing Bernard Manning-type jokes.”

Can she tell me one? “OK. Well, this one I personalised it and pretended it was about them. So Michael hears a parcel coming in the post and he runs downstairs and he shouts to Shakira, ‘Amazing, the Olympic condoms have come, and I’m going to wear the gold one tonight!’ And Shakira says, ‘Well, why not wear the silver one, and come fucking second for a change!’”

Welch puts on her fake fur and prepares to head off into the cold night.

One more thing, she says on her way out. “I want to say to people that you can still have a wonderful life with mental illness.”

I know, I say, all the best people have mental illness.

“Yes!” she roars. “They do.”

Waterloo Road is available to watch on BBC iPlayer.

In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org